Are you ready to have even more of your life sucked away by FTL’s infinite, endlessly twisting black hole of finely calibrated systems? Then you are in luck, person with an improbable amount of time on your hands, because FTL: Advanced Edition is just around the corner. Or rather, the space equivalent of a corner. There are not a lot of corners in space.

We reported last month about FTL’s free, Chris Avellone-penned expansion, but now we know more about exactly what it contains. In a post over on the FTL site, the team introduce a new race of “metallic lifeforms” called The Lanius.

I’m beginning to think there’s some kind of conspiracy to have Torment/Project Eternity/Wasteland 2/Every Classic RPG You Can Think Of story megamind Chris Avellone write everything. It’s only a matter of time until we’re all glorified flesh puppets for his dialogue. I’m not even sure what I’m writing right now is my own. Avellone could already be pulling the strings, plucking away at my thoughts as though a master of mind-controlling bluegrass banjo. Nah, that’s crazy. Surely it’d be more eviden– BUY FTL BUY FTL BUY FTL IT’S GETTING AN EXPANSION WRITTEN BY CHRIS “SEX-LYMPICS CHAMPION” AVELLONE YEAH.

…is what someone who works at videogame download service might say. I don’t work at one of those, so I don’t really know why I’m saying it. I suppose I’m generally in favour of the buying of videogames, however. I’m also in favour of videogames being affordable, so the last gasp of mad discounting in the current GoG Summer Sale prompts me to raise a grubby thumb in approval. You’ve around 20 hours left to obtain the likes of The Witcher 2, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Dungeon Keeper, Retro City Rampage and Syndicate for $cheap.Read the rest of this entry »

FTL is out today! At long last. I reckon there’ll be a fair few people reading this who are about to receive their first Kickstarted game and that’s quite exciting, as is FTL itself. I’ve already shared some of my thoughts on the beta version but it does seem as if I’d been drinking vinegar that day. Skimming back through my words, I don’t seem quite as enthused as I actually am about the game’s finer points. When fires rage and crew members panic from room to room, FTL is a delicious brew, random elements combining to create a heady commingling of anxiety and roleplay. It’s a new form of ARPG. Available direct from the developers, on GOG and Steam shortly.

Last week Adam posted some impressions of the spaceship managing FTL, and you’re allowed to read them. And now, Craig’s spoken with its creators, Justin Ma and Matthew Davis. They talk about how the project came to be, how they’re still in shock over their massive Kickstarter success, and how it was that the game was inspired by text adventures.

FTL didn’t just have a successful Kickstarter, it was stratospheric. Having asked for enough to finish off their roguelike spaceship sim, the two person development team received enough mony to build an actual interstellar vessel. Thankfully, they stuck around on Earth long enough to finish off the game, which should be out next month. In the meantime, here are my thoughts on the beta.

Awesome-looking spaceship-managing rogue-like type FTL: Faster Than Light, is going to get a beta later this month, according to Mr Jubert speaking to BluesNews. You’ll recall that the game did extraordinarily well over on the Kickstarters, raising an extra special $200k when they were only asking for $10k. Really, Internet, you do spoil us.

With Legend Of Grimrock coming up soon, my thoughts turned back to the original Dungeon Master. Released in 1987, a year I mostly spent aged 9, it was for me one of the most defining games of my childhood. Smart, enormous, and terrifying, it was such a stride forward for gaming. But I was pretty certain getting it working on a Windows 7 box was going to be something of a fiddly nightmare. Not so!

I am sad. The updated version of space-faring roguelike FTL the developers are showing off in their beta video series is a few steps beyond the IGF version I have on my PC. So, yeah, you might like what you’re seeing and want to play it, but take a moment to think about what it’s like to be me? To see a better version of a game I own, but can’t have yet. I will accept your pity. I’m about to throw a massive, over-entitled strop. Hnng. HNNG. No, I can’t stay mad at them. Not after this video shows what they’re adding to the game: new ship designs, stealth elements, and NPCs to fix fires. Also: fire beams to start fires.Read the rest of this entry »

You can’t spell ‘futile’ without ‘FTL’, and demonstrating randomly generated and bastardly tough space roguelike FTL without flicking some special developer switches seems, to me, the very definition of it. But the FTL devs are brave space types, venturing into the depths of their wonderful space-ship management sim to show off the new additions. Their 1000% Kickstarter funded indie game was already amazing, but they’re mining those Star Trek tropes for all they’re worth: they’ve added cloaking and teleporting. “Captain, we have an incoming message from YouTube.” “Onscreen, Lieutenant Sexington.”Read the rest of this entry »

Every fantasy you’ve ever had to reroute power to the shields exists in FTL. I know because I just pulled power from the sick-bay to boost my shields while I attempted to flee a hostile enemy scout. If you don’t have those fantasies yet, then soon it’ll be all you can think about. FTL’s random, rogue-like space-faring nastiness just got me into an unwinnable fight against an unmanned scout ship: if I destroyed it, it would automatically send out a distress signal to inform the rest fleet that I’d just Captain Mal-led him. So instead of going for a death blow, I had to stoke the shields and retaliate by hitting their weapons, keeping us both alive while my FTL drives powered up. No-one was hurt so far; the sick-bay was expendable. Recuperation would have to happen post-battle.Read the rest of this entry »